Which thing to do,
     If this poor trash of Venice, whom I trash
     For his quick hunting, stand the putting on,
     I’ll have our Michael Cassio on the hip,
     Abuse him to the Moor in the rank [F. right] garb—­
     For I fear Cassio with my night-cap too—­
     Make the Moor thank me, etc.

Why ‘For I fear Cassio,’ etc.?  He can hardly be giving himself an additional reason for involving Cassio; the parenthesis must be explanatory of the preceding line or some part of it.  I think it explains ‘rank garb’ or ‘right garb,’ and the meaning is, ’For Cassio is what I shall accuse him of being, a seducer of wives.’  He is returning to the thought with which the soliloquy begins, ’That Cassio loves her, I do well believe it.’  In saying this he is unconsciously trying to believe that Cassio would at any rate like to be an adulterer, so that it is not so very abominable to say that he is one.  And the idea ‘I suspect him with Emilia’ is a second and stronger attempt of the same kind.  The idea probably was born and died in one moment.  It is a curious example of Iago’s secret subjection to morality.

NOTE R.

REMINISCENCES OF OTHELLO IN KING LEAR.

The following is a list, made without any special search, and doubtless incomplete, of words and phrases in King Lear which recall words and phrases in Othello, and many of which occur only in these two plays: 

     ‘waterish,’ I. i. 261, appears only here and in O.
     III. iii. 15.

     ‘fortune’s alms,’ I. i. 281, appears only here and in
     O. III. iv. 122.

     ‘decline’ seems to be used of the advance of age only in
     I. ii. 78 and O. III. iii. 265.

     ‘slack’ in ‘if when they chanced to slack you,’ II.
     iv. 248, has no exact parallel in Shakespeare, but recalls
     ‘they slack their duties,’ O. IV. iii. 88.

     ‘allowance’ (=authorisation), I. iv. 228, is used
     thus only in K.L., O. I. i. 128, and two places
     in Hamlet and Hen.  VIII.

     ‘besort,’ vb., I. iv. 272, does not occur elsewhere,
     but ‘besort,’ sb., occurs in O. I. iii. 239 and
     nowhere else.

     Edmund’s ‘Look, sir, I bleed,’ II. i. 43, sounds like
     an echo of Iago’s ‘I bleed, sir, but not killed,’ O.
     V. ii. 288.

     ‘potential,’ II. i. 78, appears only here, in O.
     I. ii. 13, and in the Lover’s Complaint (which, I
     think, is certainly not an early poem).

‘poise’ in ‘occasions of some poise,’ II. i. 122, is exactly like ‘poise’ in ‘full of poise and difficult weight,’ O. III. iii. 82, and not exactly like ‘poise’ in the three other places where it occurs.

     ‘conjunct,’ used only in II. ii. 125 (Q), V.
     i. 12, recalls ‘conjunctive,’ used only in H.  IV.
     vii. 14, O. I. iii. 374 (F).